The culture of recognition: Another reading of Paul Ricoeur's work (original) (raw)

This dissertation work examines culture as a condition, as a context, and, finally, as an achievement. The research objectives for this examination are both historical and philosophical. The historical objective is to retrace the appearance of the notion of culture in the works of Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), and to demonstrate that Ricoeur adopts and adapts the term to his philosophical vocabulary. The accompanying philosophical objective, the proper task of this dissertation, is equally twofold. At the scholarly level this dissertation reconstructs-in the form of a hermeneutic of cultural recognition-Paul Ricoeur's cultural theory, and explicates why such a theory is necessary relative to Ricoeur's more openly-argued anthropological phenomenology of "being able." I maintain that all anthropological thought requires the support of cultural understanding, as no comprehensive anthropology is possible without the philosophical elaboration of the cultural condition that concerns human situatedness. The ultimate aim of this dissertation, however, is to go beyond this scholarly analysis and point out a subjective cultural hermeneutic process under the peculiar "dramatic" modality of this dissertation. This postcritical process is what I sum up with the term re-con-naissance. The reception of a cultural heritage is reaffirmed in the incessant task of acquiring a notion of one's self through hermeneutic reappropriation, or, as a perpetual task of freedom and the fulfillment of fundamental human possibilities in the interpretation of one's culture. Put differently, the matter of this dissertation is to recognize (reconnaître) this level of cultural hermeneutics that is unceasingly present; to expose a postcritical depth structure that takes place in the reader's own reconfigurative process as culturally enabled re-con-naissance. Since this hermeneutic concerns the postcritical interpretive i CONTENTS PART I INTRODUCTION: RICOEUR, CULTURE, AND HERMENEUTICS 1. GENERAL INTRODUCTION 2. RICOEUR AND THE QUESTION OF CULTURE 2.1 The Culture/Civilization Confusion 2.2 Between Philosophical Anthropology and Cultural Hermeneutics

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